


Anger Hot and Cold

by cenotaphs



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, not especially booker friendly, or at least joe is, they're working out their rage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:48:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25834528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cenotaphs/pseuds/cenotaphs
Summary: After making the deal with Copley, the four immortals return to their safe house and have a talk about betrayal.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 36
Kudos: 367





	Anger Hot and Cold

**Author's Note:**

> I am not anti-Booker, I swear. But from what I've read there's a whole lot of sympathy for him out there in the wilds of fandom, and I'm not feeling that generous yet. A lot of this is anger and guesswork, and is debatable. I get that. But hey, they're feeling angry rn, so why not. 
> 
> In other news I'm new here and I'm already working on something way more substantial, so please please feel free to drop me notes on characterization if anything feels off. 
> 
> Not betaed, mistakes are all my fault. Please come friend me on [tumblr](https://yusufdi.tumblr.com/), I just made one and I need to talk about things.

When they return to their humble London safe house after striking the deal with Copley, Nile waits for them all to file in before she voices her thoughts.

“Why are we trusting Copley when Booker was punished so hard for being part of the same plot he was?”

Nicky likes Nile. He truly does. He has no perspective about her, enough time has yet to pass, but he believes that she will prove to be the strongest of them. She has handled this transition with some bumps, yes, but by comparison to the rest of them, those bumps have been laughably small. Microscopic.

She fought beside them at Merrick Industries in such an easy, natural way that they might have been fighting together for a century.

But there are things that she doesn’t understand yet.

Andy answers her, though from her voice it’s obvious she doesn’t want to talk about Booker yet. “It’s not the same. Booker betrayed our trust. We never trusted Copley. We’ll use him now, but...carefully.”

Nile considers that.

Nicky looks past her to where Joe returns from dropping off their few weapons to be cleaned and oiled, despite not having been used. Nicky’s gaze instinctively sweeps the form of his love, a quick confirmation that Joe is here, well, alive. It’s as natural as breathing, that quick check-up.

Joe returns his gaze for a moment, before he takes in the other two. “And Booker wasn’t punished hard enough, if you ask me.”

“Joe.” Nicky’s objection is automatic, and lacks heat.

They feel anger differently, the two of them. Joe burns hot and fast, Nicky is slow and cold. He knows himself, and time has taught him to be honest with himself about who he is.

When they worked out the terms of Booker’s punishment, Andy first suggested twenty-five years’ separation. Nicky kept silent, trusting in Joe to object, but he knew that wouldn’t be enough. Nicky’s own anger would only reach its crest in a couple of decades. He would simmer and wallow for far longer.

Joe had suggested a thousand as a counter. Nile had choked on her beer: she didn’t yet appreciate how they viewed time. But of course Joe was bargained down anyway.

Still. Joe’s fury will be hot and loud for perhaps a few years, and then he will be willing to forgive. He will miss Booker. Nicky knows, sure as anything, that in ten years or so they will have a talk, the two of them, about forgiving him, about tracking him down just to see if he’s okay. Nicky will say no, because while Joe’s fury protects them right away, Nicky’s anger keeps them safe longer.

Joe will accept it, but they will both grieve. As Andy will grieve as she begins aging. This punishment isn’t Booker’s alone.

“I can’t say I understand why he did it,” Nile says slowly. “But from what you guys have said I’ve been lucky.”

Nicky sighs. If they’re to talk this out he’ll need a drink. Perhaps some food.

He heads for the connected kitchen, meeting Nile’s eyes briefly on the way so that she’ll know he is still paying attention.

“I keep thinking about the base, about right after…everything happened, before Andy showed up. How I felt, so strange and scared. How these women I knew so well glared at me. Like a stranger. Not just confused, they _hated_ me. Just ‘cause I woke up.”

Nicky checks for supplies, but this particular safe house is badly stocked; none of them like to stay too close to London. There are cans of things, spices he can use to make those cans palatable. Wine. Little else.

He knows better than to suggest a shopping trip. Their wounds are gone but still too fresh for separation.

He fetches glasses for the wine, listening carefully behind him.

“People hate what they can’t have,” Andy says finally. It’s not comforting, but Andy isn’t given to be comforting. “They used to call it fear. Fear of the unfamiliar. But it’s hatred. Warped envy.”

“It’s understandable,” Nicky says softly, coming out of the small kitchen to hold out glasses. “Troops at war who face down death will of course resent immortality in someone else. We can all understand that.”

Andy grabs two glasses from him and heads for Joe. Nile approaches him, taking in the glass with a wrinkle of her nose.

“I’m not a big wine person,” she says.

Nicky laughs, hearing the echo of it behind Nile. “In this group? You’ll learn.”

She takes the wine, but still seems troubled.

That won’t go away. Nicky lays a hand on her shoulder before he turns back to get his own glass and get their food started.

Nile sighs. “My point is, if I was still there, at the base or wherever they were gonna send me…feeling the way I was feeling, dealing with all that anger…I guess I can see why I was lucky not to be alone with it for long.”

“Booker was alone for less than a year before we found him,” Joe says, his voice still snappish. “That was the blink of an eye for us. He chose to stay with his family, but even then we came to him again as soon as he was ready.”

Had Nicky still been in the room he would have offered another quiet _Joe_ just to soothe. But he focused on the food, on making canned vegetables and tinned fish halfway edible.

“He wanted an ending.” Andy speaks hoarsely. “He told me it was what I wanted too. He was right.”

There is a world of emotion there, barely detectable in her low voice. She has an ending now, after all. It’s in sight. She doesn’t know yet how to feel about it, Nicky thinks, or if she still wants it now that she has no choice.

“I don’t care what he wanted!”

Nicky turns at that, at the unexpected heat in Joe’s voice. He moves to the doorway quickly. “Joe—“

“No!” Joe’s glass is empty, and he sets it too hard on the nearest surface. “You all want to talk about him with so much sympathy. I won’t listen to that. Not yet.”

“He’s our brother, Joe,” Nicky says.

Joe looks over at him, his expression stark. His eyes always show so much, sometimes Nicky is still startled by it.

“I’ve been thinking about this every moment since we got free,” Joe says fiercely. “This deal that was made with Merrick. It’s responsible for everything that’s happened since before we reunited. Do you realize that? Booker called us all together from our time off, knowing the whole time that we were going to be discovered. He lied to us so easily. Casually, like it was nothing. For days he pretended things were normal. He laughed with us, he accepted our affection. And he was plotting to end our lives as we knew them, with a smile on his face.”

Nicky frowns, thinking back. Of course they must have been captured due to Booker, but the rest… “You believe he knew the Sudan mission was fake the entire time?”

“Of course he did. There was no time between then and our capture for him to make some deal with Copley. And you know what’s really infuriating me?” Joe looks to Nicky, then to Andy and Nile. “However Copley and Booker reached this deal with Merrick, they had everything they needed from the start. Merrick had the facility and doctors, Booker had his immortality and eagerness to die. But he didn’t offer himself up as a test subject. He thought Andy wanted the same ending he did, but he didn’t even attempt to _talk_ to her about their idea. Instead he set us all up to be discovered, and then set us up again to be taken.” He looks back at Andy, his eyes far too bright in the dimness. “He could have _asked._ ”

Andy frowns. “I would never have said yes.”

“Of course not. But if he truly loved us the way we love him…” Joe’s voice shakes.

Nicky moves from the kitchen doorway, approaching his lover. He’s helpless not to when Joe is hurting.

“If he loved us,” Joe tries again, “he would have talked to you, even if he knew you would say no. He would have risked your refusal, tried to guilt you into it, before ever deciding to see us all imprisoned and tortured. Why was _that_ his only plan? Why was…”

Nicky reaches his side just as Joe turns to look at him. The sheer hurting in those dark eyes makes Nicky’s chest clench. Joe’s anger always comes from pain. Nicky sometimes forgets that.

“Why was _our_ torment acceptable for him? Why was he content with his conspiracy until Andy’s mortality made him think twice? He’s our brother, but he must hate us, Nicolo. He must hate you and I to not care what he did to us.”

Nicky sees tears in Joe’s eyes, and at that moment he hates Booker just as much.

He reaches out and grasps Joe’s hand. He would do more, he would throw himself between this man and the universe so that no grief could touch him again, but he knows Joe too well to try.

Joe squeezes his hand tightly enough to hurt. It’s an acceptable pain.

Joe looks out at the others. “I keep thinking back to the train, after we dreamed of Nile. I keep thinking that he argued against going to find her, and now I know that he argued it to try and keep us together, to make sure the next stage of their plan would be intact. He would have left her to go through this change alone while we were dissected and murdered. Booker, who claims his grief over his loneliness was cause for his betrayal, would have cursed Nile to an eternity alone.”

Nile has stayed quiet, no doubt feeling that this talk about family and betrayal isn’t hers to discuss. But she winces at Joe’s words, her eyes wide and liquid. She glances at Andy.

Andy meets her gaze for a moment, grim, before looking back at Joe. “You didn’t say any of this when we were talking out his punishment.”

Joe glares at her. “You and Nicky would barely let me talk. It’s never the right time for my anger.”

Nicky takes that blow, knowing he earned it. Sometimes Joe burns so brightly and harshly that Nicky loses sight of the fact that he’s also rational.

Joe goes on, his grip tight on Nicky’s hand. “I understand his grief, his loneliness. We lost family too. We lost our homes and our times and everything we knew, the same as you and Booker, much as he acts like having each other meant we felt no other pain. I love him. I already miss him. But forgive him?” He swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, almost angrily. “His plan was to see Nile abandoned, Nicolo and I tortured endlessly, and Andy dead. A hundred years isn’t enough time to forgive that.”

“It’s what we agreed on,” Andy says quietly. “We can’t take it back now.”

“No.” Joe’s mouth thins. He glares down at the floor. “But I have the right to be angry about it.”

There’s no argument to be made to that.

Andy huffs out a breath and turns away, taking a deep drink from her wine glass. She moves past Nile towards the back of the apartment.

Nile appears to get quickly lost in her own head, dropping to sit on the worn couch that almost fills the front room. She hasn’t touched her wine. Nicky thinks she will. He thinks she’ll drain it dry.

He will have time to work things out for himself, and with those two incredible women, later. For now he turns to face Joe, and his focus stays there.

“Forgive me, Yusuf,” he says softly, speaking in soft and ancient Arabic for Joe’s ears alone. “I did not mean to be dismissive of your pain.”

“Nicolo.” Joe breathes out. He brings their clenched hands up to his mouth and presses his lips to Nicky’s knuckles. His eyes stay on their hands, but his voice is intense. “I’ll see you in my nightmares, taking a bullet through your mouth. I’ll kneel in your blood and your brains and in my dreams you won’t wake up.”

One more for their collection, yes. Nicky accepts that, as he accepts that he himself will be haunted by Joe dying on a table less than a meter from Nicky, unreachable. One more to add to the list.

He is very aware of Nile sitting close, lost in her thoughts as she is. He tugs Joe by the hand towards the kitchen. They are well past the age of needing to constantly be near each other, but at this moment he is unwilling to let Joe out of his sight.

Despite Joe’s very real pain, the truth is that in a hundred years’ time he will be more than ready to forgive Booker. Nothing short of Nicky’s permanent death would ever make Joe lose his great heart. Joe no doubt knows that too. Maybe it makes his current anger even stronger, knowing the unfairness of inevitable forgiveness.

There was a lot said today that will linger in Nicky’s mind. There are elements of what Joe said that are conjecture and guesswork, but enough of it must be true that Nicky will lose sleep considering it all.

There is the unavoidable fact that he and Joe were caught, and tortured, and that in itself was part of the plan that Booker had agreed to. Joe’s pain. Joe’s death on that table, under the hands of that soulless doctor. Booker’s plan.

A hundred years is a long time. Nicky’s no longer sure it is long enough to outlive his slow, quietly growing rage.

But this is today, not a hundred years from now. Today he has his sisters and his dearest love, and what he can do to help them most is serve them a decent meal.

So, for now, that’s what he will do.


End file.
